Windows Server Admin Tools for Vista in Beta

It is pretty ridiculous that Microsoft would try to push Vista on corporate environments without any tools (other than RDP directly to a server) for corporate IT to manage their servers remotely directly from a Vista workstation.

There are workarounds to get the old admin pack working (often times involving manually registering the DLL's) but I still have never been able to properly manage my Exchange servers from Vista other than RDP'ing onto an XP box or directly to another server to run the management tools.

Early word is that the tools do work to mostly manage non-2008 servers (meaning it will most likely work with my old 2000 and 2003 domain services) but as I don't have Vista SP1 yet, I can't try it out.

*sigh*

This is something that of you have been waiting for a while now! Remote Server Administration Tools (RSAT) is essentially the WS08 version of the "Admin Pack". RSAT allows you to install many of the WS08 management tools on a Vista SP1 computer so you can remotely manage WS08 servers (full servers and server core). Some of the tools included in RSAT can also be used to manage WS03 servers as well.